The Clusterfuck Nation Chronicle

Commentary on the Flux of Events

Moving about the landscape this holiday, I am struck in a new way by the crummy vinyl-and-particle-board suburban houses popping up in the old pastures and cornfields outside town. It's how they fail so utterly to fulfill what is most characteristically human: to attempt to transcend the limits of a human lifetime. Life is tragic because of our consciousness that it comes to an end for us as individuals. Throughout history -- until our time, really -- people have made an attempt in their buildings to create things that will outlast them, and to endow these buildings with the signifiers of beauty to honor that process. The crap that fills the American landscape of our time is full of buildings made with no expectation that they will endure past the life of the mortgage, or, in the case of commercial buildings, the life of a lease. These buildings don't age, they just decompose. These objects that clutter up our world don't honor the human condition, they don't even acknowledge it. They represent a culture that is not good enough to be tragic, only pathetic.